Ry Cooder – “Shrinking Man” 2018 from The Prodigal Son. Ry Cooder is one of my favorite guitar players - he was in Captain Beefheart’s first Magic Band, ya know - and an often intriguing songwriter and interpreter as well. He’s not a great singer by any means, but he knows how to get spirited even when he doesn’t hit all the right notes. “Shrinking Man” is a bluesy number with an elastic form – each verse is a different length. Ry and his son, drummer Joachim Cooder, are plowing through a funky, off-kilter groove that is irresistible. The song starts off seeming to be about the way an old man like Cooder is losing body mass – his clothes are too big for him now. But as he attempts to go through his day wearing new clothes and eating, he makes sure to tell us he doesn’t want to exploit poor workers as he does so. Cooder has long been a supporter of fair labor treatment. His final verse is again personal. It’s ostensibly about prayer, but really about the way a young person’s dreams don’t always get fulfilled though it’s still good to try. This is classic Ry Cooder.
Merle Haggard & the Strangers – “Swinging Doors” 1966 from Swinging Doors. Can you imagine if all the country songs set in bars took place at the same time in the same place? There would probably be a whole lot of fighting over what gets played on the jukebox. This particular Merle Haggard classic has no fighting, just loneliness and an attempt to make excuses for bad behavior. Of course it’s not a good idea to spend so much time on a barstool that you call it your new home. Something tells me that the relationship that sent him running to the sanctity of the neon lights wasn’t all that good in the first place. Oh, well, the record is damned good. The Telecaster and steel guitar lines synch up beautifully, and then trade off parts of a solo so perfect that you’d swear they were played by the same person. Haggard’s cool vocal line and the harmonies provided by the backup singers are exquisite. We’re talking masterpiece here.
Jackie DeShannon – “A Proper Girl” 1967 from New Image. Stylistically, this is a great example of the Britpop thing from a couple years earlier, with a young woman singing a simple and catchy tune with strings and horns and a bouncing rhythm section. Lyrically, it’s definitely a new image, as Deshannon ponders how far she’s willing to go sexually to win back the boy who’s getting some from another woman. “There’s so much he longs for / And she gives him more than I can.” But then comes, “I must do what he wants or live my life without him / But I don’t think I could go on / If I found out I was wrong about him.” Spoiler alert, though it’s not mentioned in the song – you’re wrong about him, Jackie, since he’s sleeping with somebody else right now. Such a weird thing to put in a pop song just seconds before the sexual revolution would have let her decide whether she wants him in that way or not. Catchy tune, though, and I always like DeShannon’s singing.
George Jones – “My Lord Has Called Me” 1959 from Country Church Time. The theology here isn’t much deeper than an early Sunday School lesson, but Jones invests it with all the grace and certainty and hope that a life-long sinner can muster when considering the possibility of an afterlife. I love the push and pull between Jones, who sings slowly and behind the beat, and the background vocalists, who swing their repeated “Oh my Lord is calling” lines as if they hear their mom yelling to come in for their favorite supper. A nice fiddle and pedal steel accompaniment adds to the luster of the record. When I say George Jones is one of the greatest singers who ever lived, his performance of this simple hymn only redoubles my belief.
Combo Chimbita – “Te Vi” 2019 from Ahomale. One of the many reasons to encourage immigration to the US is the great music that can result. This group of four children of Colombian immigrants to New York build on the foundations of cumbia, adding wild rhythmic inventions in the drums, reverb-drenched guitar lines, wandering bass parts, and mesmerizing vocals to create something brand new. I don’t know what they’re singing about here, but I’m drawn in to the sound of the words, the way singer Carolina Oliveros draws from Latin, rock, and even African influences to carry the melody straight into my head. The odds are that very few people reading this have heard this before, and I expect your minds to be blown the way mine was.